


Surge and Fade

by ViciousRhythm



Series: Reylo trope coverage [3]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, No resolution for said angst, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, but it might be hopeful, canon character death, guys it's not happy, spoilers for TFA i guess?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-23
Updated: 2016-01-30
Packaged: 2018-05-15 16:20:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5792389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ViciousRhythm/pseuds/ViciousRhythm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Soulmark au, wherein the actions are the same, but everything is much worse.</p>
<p>Rey has two names on her arms, and they come and go like nothing she's seen before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Set in an AU where the name of you soulmate appears on your wrist, and scabs and scars when they die.

The wrappings on Rey’s arms serve one purpose – to cover what is written there, and what sometimes is not. She didn’t understand it at first, the shifting names on her skin and what they meant. She can’t remember now who told her about Names, but it was almost certainly someone old, someone whose Name was a scarred shadow. Information was rarely given freely, and Rey can only imagine the teller must have taken comfort in the thought of unloading a bit of their loss onto new ears.

_It’s a person who is yours_ , she remembers someone saying. _Someone who completes you and makes you more._

Rey would like to believe that’s true, and she does, in the same way she believes her family will return one day. It’s a thing that needs to be real, for there to be hope and kindness in the galaxy, but it will do nothing to change Rey’s life. And, if she’s honest, she doesn’t understand it.

For the first thing, she doesn’t have one Name, she has two. And for another, they fade and reappear, like nothing she’s ever seen before. She has the scars of _Ben_ and _Kylo Ren_ trailing up and down her arms, beginning at her wrist and travelling upward. She knows she had _Ben_ first, only because his name appears as a delicate, near-invisible white scar below her right wrist, where Names are meant to be. _Kylo Ren_ is an almost equally faded scar on her left, in the same location, and there’s no rhyme or reason to it from there.

They come and go in different handwriting, _Ben_ starting out precise and even, slowly becoming more spiky and hastily scrawled as _Kylo Ren_ stays on her arm, black and solid, for much longer than any repetition of _Ben_ ever has. There are nearly a dozen of both Names, though Kylo Ren is the one that has stayed on the inside of her right elbow for a long time now.

She remembers, vaguely, a short time when Kylo Ren’s Name had scarred over and Ben’s hadn’t shown up to replace it, and the panic she’d felt watching her Name go white and withered. A few weeks later, it had been Kylo Ren’s Name that returned, somehow looking almost carved into her skin though it sat like the ink of a tattoo as it always had.

Now, Rey has given up trying to reason out why her Names are so odd. It’s been years since she dreamed of Ben or Kylo Ren coming for her, taking her away from Jakku. It will happen or it won’t, and that’s the end of it. The chances are astronomical that anyone in the galaxy would meet their perfect match at nineteen anyway.

-

Of course, she meets him. And of course, Rey doesn’t know his name at first. He fails to invade her mind, and she never gave him her name, so it’s doubtful he knows precisely who she is, but Rey knows the instant Han Solo shouts his name across the expanse of the crumbling oscillator facility. _Ben!_ She knows with unshakeable certainty that this man, this monster, has her Name on his wrist.

She and Finn watch with bated breath as father and son meet in the center of the cavernous building, voices raised, but the distance too far to distinguish what they are saying. Her heart beats in her throat as Kylo Ren holds out his lightsaber, offering it to Han’s grasp. She has a weightless moment of dizzying hope that it will end here. That the Name against her elbow will scar and leave _Ben_ in its wake forever. That Leia’s son will be returned to her, the First Order crippled so that the fight can truly begin.

She couldn’t stop herself from crying out if she tried, watching the man who is meant to be _hers_ kill his own father, who could have been to her the father she never knew. It’s difficult to determine which hurts more; the loss of Han Solo or the knowledge that, though her mind screams she can never forgive this, she _can_. She could. She very well might. In that instant, Rey wants nothing more than uncertainty. To not know who Kylo Ren is beyond her enemy, beyond the ragged hole he’s torn in her heart.

Her scream is echoed by Chewie, and Kylo Ren looks up at that. She doesn’t want to see it, doesn’t want even the _possibility_ that this man will find a way into her heart, but she sees his face before it closes off, before Chewie shoots him. It is pure anguish, and Rey’s chest burns, stomach roiling. How dare he? How _dare_ he realize just too late what it is he’s done?

The shot catches him in the side, probably a gut shot, and Rey refuses to be anything but glad. He deserves it, he deserves all of it and more, and her thoughts are a swirl of hatred and sorrow as she and Finn run from the shaking building to the sound of explosions.

-

Untrained as she is, Rey doesn’t draw from a particular light or dark side of the Force when Kylo Ren so helpfully reminds her of it. She closes her eyes and feels the currents flowing around her, plucks what is strong and useful, polishes it in her mind so that it shines. Like anything she has found in her life, it is grey and uncertain as she turns it over for the first time. The dust falls quickly, though, revealing a path so certain she can feel it in her limbs. There is no alliance here, only survival, and when her eyes snap open once more, she knows she will win this fight.

Kylo Ren is a flickering, uncertain thing in her mind’s eye, billowing red and green from his side where he’s still bleeding, silvery blue gathered at his back, and all the eddies crashing together. In contrast to his chaos, Rey can feel the Force steady as steel in her arms, and she slips under his guard like water.

From there the fight is not long. She brings him to his knees once and hesitates, torn between being rid of him and giving him a chance he doesn’t deserve. He staggers upright, refuses to stay down, until she moves more out of instinct than anything, forcing his saber from his hand and swinging her own across his face. Panting, she watches him rise again, if only barely, and can see the wound already cauterized, splitting his face across the bridge of his nose and between his brows.

_Good_ , she thinks. _Let him carry a few more scars. He has some catching up to do._

The planet cracks beneath her feet before he can do something foolish like stand again, and Rey doesn’t hesitate to run when there is a chasm between them. Finn is still lying in the snow behind her, and they have to get off this planet before it’s too late.

-

On the trip back to the Resistance, Rey excuses herself for a moment and takes the privacy to indulge in the painful exploration of her arms. Unwrapping them slowly, she lets her eyes pass over the most recent location of his Name, tripping down to her wrist. _Ben_ is picked out as reliably as ever beneath her palm, and Rey holds onto her own wrist like it will let her hold on to the promise of what could have been. She doesn’t quite cry, but she does work her way through a few shuddering gasps, mourning both Han and Ben Solo.

When she gathers herself to look over her arms more carefully, there is a new constellation of names circling the skin above her elbows. Both _Ben_ and _Kylo Ren_ written in cramped, tiny writing, all of them scabbed and healing. She counts at least three repetitions of each Name. The newest bracket the outsides of her arms, halfway between elbow and shoulder on either side. They’re both written in faint, almost apologetic text, _Ben_ , _Kylo Ren_ , and Rey almost wishes the sight surprised her.

 

_Someone who completes you_. _Who makes you more_.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kylo Ren and Ben Solo share a Name

There are exactly two indulgences Kylo Ren allows himself to carry with him at all times. One is Darth Vader’s helm, a prize he is entirely unwilling to let out of his reach, and the other is a pot of high quality cosmetics in the exact same shade as the thin skin covering his wrists. Supreme Leader Snoke knows of the former, and Ren has taken pains to make sure he doesn’t know about the latter. There’s hardly any call for Ren’s wrists to be visible, thankfully. He has gloves and sleeves and, should one of those be absent, color smeared over his skin so no one can see the Name there.

Sith have never carried Names.

Ben Solo has a Name though. It’s scrawled across his wrist in tight, precise lettering, same as it always has been, except for the texture of the skin beneath it, where Kylo Ren had once tried to excise it. He’d loved his Name when he was young. All of four and he’d had more interest in writing out _Rey_ on every scrap of paper than practicing his own name. When he did learn it, Ben sometimes marked his name above the one on his wrist, painstakingly lining up B over R, two E’s stacked together, then an N and a Y. It was always a particular delight to him that they matched; short, three-letter names that fit together just right. By the time he was ten and training with Uncle Luke, Ben hadn’t stopped loving his Name, but he _had_ started worrying about it.

As a child, Names meant one thing to him: someone will love you, perfectly. It was a childish belief, and though strong, it seemed everything in Ben’s life was meant to batter it down. He knew his mother and father had each other’s Names, and yet they couldn’t be called perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Ben grew up learning all the imperfections that could be in a relationship, and how much it cost to know in your own skin someone is meant for you, but still makes you hurt.

When he learned that his infamous grandfather had a Name, the cost of having one grew higher in his mind. For all that Darth Vader was Dark, he was powerful, the Name on his wrist bringing the only weakness Ben knew of him. Compassion, Luke told him, was something Anakin Skywalker could never shake, not when he wore it like a brand on his skin, not when his children were there to remind him of Padme and the man he had been when she loved him.

Ben learns about his grandfather in tiny pieces, pulled together from Luke’s stories and Leia’s bitterness and whispered legends. He becomes Ben’s hero, a man who almost left behind the pull of that Name, that one weakness he nearly shook off when Padme died. Ben’s Name sits like a rash on his skin when he thinks about all it could give him and all he could lose for it. He looks at the people he knows with Names, looks at people like Poe and Luke who don’t have them, and decides the risk can’t be worth the reward. There is no such thing as perfection, Ben tells himself when he is fourteen, but there is greatness.

It isn’t until he’s eighteen and firmly _Kylo Ren_ that he thinks perhaps it wasn’t his own voice telling him greatness was what he could achieve. Snoke has been the whisper in the back of his head for so long he sometimes has trouble keeping track of which thoughts started with whom. He supposes it doesn’t matter anymore. Snoke’s mission is his mission, the thought process doesn’t matter. He doesn’t bother keeping secrets from the Supreme Leader, because what of his messy life is worth hiding from Snoke? There is always that one patch of skin secreted away, however. Physically and mentally, Ren smuggles his Name, never letting on that the Force or something vast and more mysterious has chosen someone for him, given her to him by name.

There is a moment of weakness when he tries to just be rid of the Name. It’s delicate skin across his wrist, thin and pale, and he’s clumsy with his left hand. Kylo Ren is no stranger to pain, but the careful, slow cuts make him flinch in a way nothing else has. He peels it back, bleeding all over his own hands so that he can’t tell if he’s cut deep enough. A few layers of skin should do it, but he digs in like it’s a parasite instead of the blessing he was taught as a child. His wrist heals slowly. The rough rectangle of an open wound, it scabs and reopens and bleeds and eventually heals, and _Rey_ is still there, more stark than ever against the white scar tissue.

He doesn’t try to cut it out again, having no patience for the healing if it will do him no good. He can’t leave it alone though. Most days he forgets about it, going from action to sleep to waking again without even glancing at his wrist. But every so often, he’ll turn his hand just right or catch sight of his bare wrists in the ‘fresher and reread her name; his downfall if he can’t be rid of it.

-

The scavenger is just that when he sees her – a scavenger, nothing more. A thorn in his side and tangled in the web of Rebels and Han Solo and a map to the last Jedi, but no one important in her own right. She’s a frightened slip of a thing when he catches her in the forests of Takodana, and he doesn’t resist toying with her. Her blaster is useless, but the chase is some small measure of entertainment, and he takes it. She cowers before him and so he is frightening. And then, once he has a chance to investigate her mind, she is suddenly useful.

“We have what we need,” Kylo Ren tells the troopers, and he doesn’t stop to think about whether it would be prudent to find the droid as well. He doesn’t question the action of carrying her unconscious body from the forest to his ship. He just does it and it is only in hindsight that he sees the recklessness for what it is – weakness, the one he’d so hoped to shake off.

True, he doesn’t succeed in prying the map from her mind, but that doesn’t mean Ren walks away with nothing. He sees the inconsequential memories of an empty desert, of hopes faded and thin like an old shirt worn too many times. When he presses further, digging carefully through her thoughts, it’s with caution. He can feel how strong she is in the Force, and would hate to damage an asset, and so he proceeds gently.

When she fights him, he abandons care. It becomes a power struggle between them, both straining and then suddenly she slips past him and her consciousness blares so loudly in his mind that he doesn’t notice her perusing his thoughts at first over the noise of her. It isn’t like hearing, not like she’s shouting it, but Ren _feels_ who she is with the strength of her push. She is Rey. No family or title, just Rey. The scavenger, the Name in his skin.

She repeats his fears to him, latching onto the first searing thing she finds, but missing the horror that is awoken at the knowledge of her name. He leaves so fast he forgets to don his mask, but he doesn’t call it a retreat.

She’s gone when he returns, and the rage he lets out on the device meant to hold her is nowhere near satisfying.

-

Even her scream isn’t enough to draw him out of the swirling mess of his emotions as he watches Han Solo fall. It is the first time he can remember wanting his father back, the irony not lost on him. Being shot certainly brings him back to the more pressing matters, however. Rey and Chewbacca and FN-2187 all run, the building crumbling around them. Kylo Ren staggers after them, the pain in his side searing, almost enough to drown out the torment in his mind. He has lost everything he once had, crushed it with his own hand, and he can feel the torn and tattered pieces of who he used to be burning. If he can do this, he can only be Kylo Ren, and yet he has never felt more like Ben Solo than he does tracking them through the snow.

He lets his mind fly open, plucking at the strings of connection where he can still feel Rey tangled at the edges of his thoughts. He finds them easily with that connection to guide him. Rey is desperate, he can sense it, and he has no patience for her attempt at shooting him. He doesn’t think about lifting her off her feet and into the air, he just does it. The Stormtrooper races to her side, and Kylo Ren feels possessive rage bubble up in him uncontrollable and entirely unwelcome. He’s shouting and then muttered _Ben’s Name_ , it’s _his_ , and the deserter has no right to it.

“Traitor!”

He screams it across the snowy forest, intent on blood. If he must destroy everyone in his path to purge himself of this terrible capacity to want, so be it. He’s come too far, done too much, left behind too many things to give in now. So he fights the trooper, brutal, cruel, and careless in his attacks. He knows he’s being heavy handed and does nothing to stop it. When he has the boy backed into a tree, he presses the cross guard of his saber into his flesh and relishes the scream it earns him.

The Stormtrooper loses Vader’s lightsaber  when Ren tugs it from his grasp and, after a final stroke that splits his back clean open, Kylo Ren drops his attack to call the saber to him. It has to be all that matters, taking up the inheritance that is rightfully his. There can be no way but forward now.

It flies past him though, bypassing Kylo Ren and landing like a homecoming in Rey’s hand. With equal strength, he hates her and wants her. She is so bright it scorches him, pulls at his untethered edges almost irresistibly. Their fight is so unmatched at first, it makes him think of Takodana, of a game of cat and mouse, but he hadn’t known then. The knowledge of who she is – _whose_ she is – is unforgettable once learned, and he can feel it crawling under his skin.

“You need a teacher,” he tells her, sabers crossed while the earth fractures beneath them. “I can show you the ways of the Force.”

He cannot take his eyes from her face. Somehow, everything seems to hang on this moment, when he’s asked her to choose. If she will only let him, he can keep her. And he doesn’t let himself complete the thought. _Keep her safe_. It isn’t weakness if it’s possession and she would be a prize. He thinks of Snoke’s pride and approval, and deliberately doesn’t think of someone who will love you, perfectly.

There is no perfection, only greatness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like I should be working on the multitude of AU ideas I have, or continuing more popular parts of this series, but this is where my heart lies. I'll get cracking on other AUs and chapters later today, I swear.

**Author's Note:**

> What am I doing with my life, you ask? Apparently writing one shots like a mad woman. If anyone wants to shout out requests for a trope you like for this series, let me know, I'm evidently on a roll.


End file.
